Leon Arness
Leon Arness is a Virtual Adept in San Francisco. Overview A longtime prowler of MUDS, MUSHs, and MUCKs, Leon was targeted early on in his Netsurfing career by a pair of Virtual Adepts who agreed that not only was he good people, but he was good raw materiel for the Technocracy. With that in mind, they resolved to get him first. Working his initiation online, the quickly brought him up to speed on the state of the hidden world war. Leon, always a quiet rebel with an astonishing stubborn streak, quickly picked up on what his mentors were talking about. He also, being a stellar hacker and coder, picked up their true names, using his power to wring them dry of the information which they'd initially held back. With all of the evidence in hand, Leon decided that the only option that offered a potential victory over the Technocracy was to subvert their paradigm rather than overthrow it, taking their titanic momentum of thought and steering it down channels more beneficial to the Traditions. With that in mind, he dropped out of his graduate program and set up shop in Multimedia Gulch. A moderately successful game programer, he has recruited multiple other Virtual Adepts to help him with his master plan, which involves subverting the software standards of the world to Leon's specifications. His company, Sweatshop Games, has won multiple awards for its "stunningly original, non-linearly plotted games" (to quote on magazine blurb) and is currently at work on a program called Hellfire that, when installed, will remove the operating system of any machine and replace it with Hellfire's proprietary one. On the surface, Hellfire Operating System (HOS, pronounced "hose") functions in a manner precisely identical to the operating system it is replacing, Underneath the basic functions, though, HOS does some wonderfully subversive things to both hardware and user... and once installed, it never lets the original operating system back on. Leon has already crashed one Technocracy-funded firm by force-feeding all of their systems HOS. One wonders what he'll do for an encore. Image Despite his Western name, Leon is actually of Chinese descent, about 5'6" with hair down to his shoulder blades. He wears thin-lens prescription glasses with wire rims, and prefers dress shirts in simple patterns to anything else. Even at meetings with distributors he wears sneakers and jeans, and any distributor who can speak Mandarin will win extra concessions from Leon out of sheer respect. Leon's build is average, and his love of good restaurants hardly shows as all. Personal Leon is a very friendly guy. As long as someone isn't insinuating that he's stupid by holding out on him, he gets along very well with just about everybody. He's a good boss, and coders are crawling all over themselves to get into his shop. He's profitable, too, and several of the big boys have sniffed him out with an eye towards purchase. He's most interested in staying independent, though, and he trusts big corporate money as far as he can throw the corporation behind it. He likes traveling, especially to foreign countries, and his excursions are the best part of the job. Well, that and sticking one in the Technocracy's craw. Either will make him smile an awful lot. References # CTD. Immortal Eyes: The Toybox, pp. 138-139. Category:Mage: The Ascension character Category:Virtual Adepts